


Uncovered

by Anonymous



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Bathing/Washing, Buried Alive, Extra Treat, Hurt Peter, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-19
Updated: 2019-05-19
Packaged: 2020-03-07 21:28:44
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18881608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: “Hey kid, what’s up? It’s Friday night, you got a hot date?”There’s a shaky breath on the other end of the line. “No. Um. Something happened.”Written for the prompt: Accidentally burying yourself alive.





	Uncovered

**Author's Note:**

  * For [tuesday](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tuesday/gifts).



> I have no idea if I've interpreted the "accidentally burying yourself alive" prompt correctly or not, but the idea grabbed my attention and I wanted to take a shot at writing it - so uhh, hopefully this is within the ballpark of what you wanted for that?

“H-hey Mr. Stark.”

The kid sounds a little breathless, although that isn’t entirely unusual when he calls. Possibly because he’s been out swinging around Queens.

Possibly other reasons that Tony is electing not to ponder at the moment.

“Hey kid, what’s up? It’s Friday night, you got a hot date?”

There’s a shaky breath on the other end of the line. “No. Um. Something happened.”

Tony sits up. The kid isn’t just breathless, not in the way Tony had thought when he’d first picked up. His breathing is labored, which trips all kinds of alarm bells in Tony’s head.

“What kind of ‘something?’”

“There was this building - ”

“ _Was?_ ”

“Yeah, was. It kind of fell down?”

At some point they’re going to have to have a conversation about Peter phrasing that as a question. But not right now.

“Were you _in it_ , when it fell down?”

“Yeah, I’m still in it. I’m...” there’s a rustling sound, an unmistakable scrape of metal against stone. “I’m under it. I’m fine though! I’m okay, I’m just stuck. That’s not why I called.”

Tony’s suit is already activating, machinery crawling across his skin at a rapid pace as he makes his way over to the launch pad - but that last sentence pulls him up short.

“You’re _stuck under a collapsed building_ , but that’s not why you called?”

“I can get out, I’ve done it before. But I can’t - ” the kid’s voice breaks on the word, “ - not yet. There are other people, in the building. I can hear them above me. If I move...”

If Peter moves he could destabilize the whole structure. Whatever’s left of it.

FRIDAY already has a flight plan set, mapped straight to the emergency transponder on Peter’s suit. Fire and rescue are on site, but it won’t be safe for them to enter until the structure’s been stabilized.

“Alright kid, hang on. I’m on my way.”

“Okay,” Peter says, and his voice sounds impossibly small.

“Good. Now this is one of those times where I’m gonna need you to be honest with me - how badly are you hurt?”

“Well I kinda feel like I had a building dropped on me - oh wait.”

Fair point.

“Glad to hear your sarcasm is mercifully undamaged,” Tony says. Then, off comms, “FRIDAY?”

“Scanning,” she replies. “I’m detecting multiple contusions, most likely several cracked ribs. One arm appears to be pinned in place, possible crush injury.”

It’s not great, but it’s not as bad as it could be. That’s what he tells himself as he counts down the minutes and seconds until he arrives on site.

He keeps Peter talking in the meantime, prodding questions about school, midterms, the lamentable state of dorm food - anything Tony can think of to keep the kid conscious.

What he finds when he gets there is barely controlled chaos - the police have established a barrier around the building, preventing the crowd of press and onlookers from getting too close to the hulking mass of debris that used to be an apartment building.

Tony makes a slow circuit of the site while FRIDAY runs some scans, pinpointing the weakest points of the rubble; the most likely areas to collapse further, if disturbed.

He deploys a set of stabilizers to prop up those areas, and to relieve some of the weight on others.

He’s got heat signatures. Five of them, not including the one FRIDAY has tagged as Peter. Two relatively close to the top, three about midway down, and the last one - Peter, at the very bottom.

From what he can cobble together from Peter’s disjointed commentary and the story from the first responders on site, there had been some kind of construction accident in the adjacent lot that had destabilized a load-bearing bearing wall in the apartment building.

Peter had run inside to try brace the wall; keep the thing standing long enough for everyone else to get out. Most of the residents had made it out in time, thanks to the kid.

Just not quite everyone.

The first two are relatively easy to extract. Tony lends a hand, carefully and strategically shifting debris out of the way until the EMTs can get them both loaded onto stretchers and safely into the waiting ambulances.

The others though, those take time. Tony can’t go blasting his way in for the very same reason Peter can’t use his super-strength to bust his way out; every shift in the rubble above puts the people inside at greater risk.

“How you holding up, kid?”

This time there’s a long pause before Peter replies. “Oh hey, Mr. Stark. When’d you get here?”

“I’ve been here since about five minutes after you called me.”

“I called you? Oh. That’s good, that’s alright then.”

“Glad you think so.”

“M’sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. But maybe don’t go running into any more collapsing buildings in the near future, as a personal favor to me, okay?”

“I meant about the ferry.”

_The ferry?_

Tony repositions a few of the stabilizers, trying to keep ahead of how the rescue crews are causing slight shifts in the weight distribution of the debris pile. He’s distracted. It takes him longer to catch on to what Peter is talking about than it probably should.

Oh. _That_ ferry.

“Don’t worry about the ferry, Pete. That was a long time ago.”

“You were pretty mad though.”

“Yes, I was. Like I said, long time ago.”

It doesn’t feel that long ago now though. Not when Peter is buried under a couple dozen tons of concrete, steel, and lumber. Tony is just as freaked out as he can remember feeling that day, at finding Peter trying to hold together 3,000-something tons of steel with his own body.

Right now, FRIDAY has Peter’s vitals up in one corner of the display. The numbers aren’t great, but they’re holding steady.

The third one they bring out is a kid. An _actual_ kid - not a kid in the way that Tony still calls Peter a kid. She’s maybe ten, ashen-looking and bleeding from a head wound, but mercifully alive.

Tony curses to himself. They have to move faster, and not just for Peter’s sake.

But faster isn’t safe, not for any of them, and Tony knows it.

It takes the better part of half an hour to shift the remains of a concrete wall enough to reach the fourth and fifth victims. A man, middle-aged, slumped in what used to be an interior hallway, and an older woman who’s still conscious but almost certainly going into shock.

“We’re almost there,” Tony tells Peter over the comms.

Peter doesn’t reply.

“Hey! Kid, wake up. Time for school.”

“Wha - ?”

 _Thank fucking christ._ “Don’t fall asleep on me now. It’s almost showtime.”

“Did - did Ned call you?”

“No, you called me, hotshot.”

“Oh yeah. Okay. Hey, can I move? I wanna move, but I -”

“Not just yet,” Tony cuts him off. “Let me clear away some of this stuff first. Can you hold off for like, five more minutes for me?”

“Yeah, yeah. S’fine.”

Tony loses himself in a blur of shifting concrete and crossbeams, so much dust kicked up from the wreckage that Tony has to rely on the suit’s HUD to see anything at all. Peter is at the far back of what used to be a small basement laundry room - the first thing Tony can make out through the haze is one of his arms, sticking out from under a pile of cinder blocks, looking far too delicate and small to belong to Peter.

Peter isn’t delicate, Tony reminds himself. The kid can bench press a truck.

Reminding himself of that fact doesn’t make Peter’s arm look any bigger though, or any less dwarfed by the pile of debris on top of him.

Even injured, Peter probably could - if necessary, muscle his way out. But Tony is right here, and would very much prefer if he didn’t have to. The kid shouldn’t be putting any strain on that arm, or on his busted ribs either, for that matter.

“Hey kid,” he says, lifting an I-beam out of the way so he can see Peter’s shoulders and back. “So, remember when we talked about you not doing the things I would do or the things I wouldn’t do? This counts as both of those things.”

Peter lifts his head up at the sound of Tony’s voice, then lowers it back down in relief. “Gray area,” he mumbles, waggling the fingers of one hand.

Working together, they manage to free the rest of Peter’s body in relatively short order, although Tony can’t help but notice the stiff, careful way Peter is moving.

“You okay with a quick ride to the tower?”

“M’fine. I heal. I just need to sleep it off.”

“And you will. At the tower. C’mon, you know you can’t go back to your dorm like this.”

Tony doesn’t actually wait for a response. He wraps both arms around Peter, one around his shoulders and the other just above his hips - careful to avoid putting pressure on his ribs. Peter slumps against him without protesting, which only serves to amplify the alarm bells that have been ringing in Tony’s head ever since Peter had explained why he called.

The flight back to the tower takes longer this time, mostly because while Tony himself is tucked safely inside the cocoon of his suit, Peter’s own suit isn’t exactly designed with sustained flight in mind. He has FRIDAY kick on the heater in the kid’s suit and takes the flight as slow and easy as he can.

He doesn’t stop moving until he’s laying the kid down on the bed, every gear and joint on the suit feeling entirely too Potemkin for the job. He reaches out to deactivate his suit and Peter’s at nearly the same moment, needing to see the damage for himself.

“I’m not actually, like, an invalid, you know,” Peter says, reaching up to pull off his mask.

His hair is wild, thanks to the mask, and there’s a dark bruise high on his cheekbone, a trickle of blood from an already-healed cut near one eyebrow.

“Just because I can’t fly doesn’t mean - wait, is this your bedroom?”

“It’s _a_ bedroom, yes,” Tony hedges.

He has a lot of bedrooms. This one happens to have direct access to the landing pad outside, so it was the obvious choice for some quick triage.

Tony makes a _hurry up_ gesture, waving one hand. “C’mon, off with it. Let’s see the damage.”

Peter rolls his eyes, but shrugs his way out of the top-half of the suit, ducking his head when Tony hisses through his teeth at the sight. Peter’s chest is a mottled mess of bruising, and so is the arm that was pinned under the cinder blocks.

“Yikes, kid.”

“It could’ve been worse?” Peter offers, mouth snapping shut at whatever he must see in Tony’s expression. But he seems to gather himself, chin tipping up slightly before he continues. “Like I said, I just need to sleep it off. I can go, you know, find a couch or something.”

Tony briefly wonders what the hell the kid even means by ‘or something,’ before deciding that it’s immaterial.

“At least let me help you get cleaned up. I’ll loan you some clothes, you can sleep in a bed and everything.”

Peter stares at him for what feels like a solid minute, but is probably only a few seconds.

He blinks at Tony. Then he nods. “Yeah, okay.”

Tony helps him to the bathroom, despite Peter’s muttered protestations - one arm looped over Tony’s shoulder, the other holding his suit up around his hips. Once inside, Tony turns his back to Peter, crouching down to fill the tub, one hand under the tap to check that the water is hot, but not too hot.

He’s pretty sure you’re supposed to ice fresh bruises, not apply heat, but with Peter’s accelerated healing they’re probably already past the point where icing would help anyway. He ponders that thought a bit more, deliberately ignoring the gentle _shush_ of fabric as Peter strips out of the suit somewhere behind him.

Peter lays a hand on his shoulder for support as he steps into the tub, not waiting for it to even finish filling up. Tony deliberately looks away.

Why the hell did he offer to help the kid get cleaned up again? Sure, it was the right thing to do, but the right thing felt a lot less right when it meant that he was achingly aware of just how exposed Peter was, just inches away.

But then Peter lets out a low groan as he settles back into the water, and Tony remembers, right. Literally had a building dropped on him. Broken ribs. Injured arm. All rightfully earned in the heroic act of saving innocent lives.

Tony can damn well keep his dick in check long enough to help the kid get cleaned up and into bed.

He winces at his own poor phrasing on that last part.

Back into bed to _rest_ , he thinks to himself, pointedly.

Tony glances over at Peter, who is leaning back in the water with his eyes closed, his arms stretched out along the lip of the tub on either side.

“You okay here? You’re not gonna drown if I leave for two minutes to find you some clothes?”

Peter snorts, cracking one eye open to look over at Tony.

“That would be amazing. I survive getting crushed by a building only to die falling asleep in Tony Stark’s bathtub.”

“Just so we’re clear, you’re _not_ going to do that, right? I wanted to check, because sometimes we have these little communication hiccups where you go and do the exact thing I asked you not to do, and then I end up - ”

“I promise I’m not going to drown in your bathtub,” Peter says, exasperated.

“Good.”

Tony grabs the suit up off the floor without really looking at it, beating an escape back to his bedroom. The suit gets dumped on an ottoman for examination later. For now, he heads over to his closet to grab some sweats and a t-shirt for the kid. The clothes should fit well enough; Tony’s still got an inch or two of height on the kid, and he’s a bit broader across the shoulders and torso, although not by much, anymore.

By the time he makes it back into the bathroom, Peter is playing around with the jets in the tub. He’s avoiding the upper-body ones, mostly messing around with the ones expertly placed to hit the calves, glutes, and arches of the feet in all the right places.

“This tub is awesome, by the way,” Peter says, fiddling with one of the switches. “Hey, do you keep your windows locked all the way up here? Or if you do, would FRIDAY let me in - if I asked nicely?”

“You’re planning on breaking and entering so you can use my bathtub?”

“I wouldn’t be breaking! I would just be… entering.”

Tony sits down on the closed toilet lid, reaching over to grab the shower wand off the wall. “Lean forward so I can get your hair.”

“Mmm, okay.”

He doesn’t have to do this. Even with one arm out of commission, Peter is perfectly capable of washing his own hair. A very reasonable voice that sounds alarmingly enough like JARVIS reminds him of this fact. And like so many other gentle and not-so-gentle reminders Tony had received from JARVIS over the years, he opts to ignore it completely.

Peter’s hair is slightly longer than it’d been last time he’d seen the kid. Tony takes a little longer on it than he normally would with his own hair, but that’s only because the combination of mask-head plus Peter’s natural curls means that he has to spend an extra few minutes working out the knots with his fingers before he can rinse out the conditioner.

He doesn’t spend too long on it though; healing tends to sap Peter’s energy like nothing else, and with both hands buried in the kid’s hair, it’s impossible to miss the way his head is lolling on his shoulders as he struggles to stay conscious.

“Seriously, best bathtub ever,” Peter says, his words slurring together a bit as Tony rinses the conditioner out.

Tony reaches down between Peter’s feet to pull the plug. He shoves the wand into Peter’s hands so he can finish rinsing himself off as the water drains.

“Change of clothes are by the sink,” he says. “You good, or do you need me to stay?”

Peter lets out a heavy sigh.

“I’m good.”

Tony wipes his hands down the thighs of his jeans, ignoring the plentiful towels arranged nearby. He stands up. It isn’t until then he notices something he must have missed when he was grabbing the kid’s suit earlier. There’s a scrap of red fabric laying on the floor, kicked up against the edge of the tub.

It could be a piece of the suit, or maybe the mask - he doesn’t specifically remember seeing the mask when he’d set down the suit outside earlier.

But it’s not.

“Hey Pete,” he says.

“Hmm?” Peter looks up from where he’s gingerly rinsing off his injured arm with the shower wand.

“Is that a thong?”

“Uhh, yeah.”

“Okay.”

“It’s a skintight spandex suit, Mr. Stark. What’d you think I wore underneath?” The kid is too exhausted to sound anything other than amused by Tony's question. 

What Tony would like to say is: I hadn’t ever really thought about it. And it would even be true; he has very distinctly and intentionally Not Thought About It. He can’t say that though, because right at this moment he’s having a small problem trying to think about literally anything else. Like, for example -

\- Peter, trapped inside a collapsed building. ( _While wearing a thong._ )

\- First responders need better equipment for search and rescue; he should be helping with that. ( _It’s fire engine red..._ )

\- Peter clearly needs a suit that offers more protection than soft-shell fabric can provide. Tony should be doing something about that too. ( _No, not fire engine red. It’s hot-rod red; Iron-Man-suit red._ )

\- What the hell was the kid doing running into the basement of a collapsing building anyway? ( _Are all of Peter’s thongs that same color, or does he have a variety?_ )

None of which Tony is prepared to have a conversation about at this very moment, and neither is Peter.

Even with Peter using the shower wand to rinse off, the water level in the tub is dropping steadily; down to just above his belly button now.

Tony flees the bathroom.

It takes a while before he hears the water shut off, the tub stop draining. There’s the soft sound of bare feet on the heated tiles, a few near-silent minutes while Peter presumably gets dressed. Tony spends the time pacing. He hasn’t let anything slip yet. It’s only a win by the very slimmest of margins, but a win nevertheless. He’ll take it.

Peter steps out of the bathroom quietly, shutting off the light, moving slowly.

A few steps into the room, he stops.

“Um, should I,  is there another - ?” he says, glancing towards the door.

“No,” Tony says, too quickly. “No, stay here.”

“I don’t want to kick you out of your own bed.”

“You aren’t.”

Peter blinks at him, bemused. “So this isn’t your bedroom?”

“No, it is. I just don’t need it right now. You can have it. It's all yours.”

Peter looks back and forth between Tony and the bed. Tony can tell it must be taking a gargantuan effort on Peter’s part not to stumble over to the bed and immediately pass out.

“Seriously, kid. Take it.”

Which is apparently enough to crumble whatever remained of Peter’s resolve. He nods his thanks, then takes a few aching steps over to the bed, letting himself sink down onto it with a sigh.

“FRIDAY, lights?” Tony says, and the lights dim to almost nothing. “You need anything, before I go?”

“Nah, I’m good.”

“Okay. If you change your mind, just tell FRIDAY to let me know.”

“I will.” Peter is quiet for a beat, then, “Mr. Stark?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you, for helping me get out of there.”

“No thanks needed, kid. I was just the clean up crew, you did the hard part.”

“M’kay. But still, thank you.”

Tony picks up the tattered suit from where he’d left it earlier and leaves the room before he gives into one of any number of sudden temptations that flit through his brain - like settling down on the side of the bed to stay, or running his hands through Peter’s hair until he drifts off to sleep, or planting a kiss on the kid’s forehead.

He leaves the bedroom door cracked open, waiting until he’s safely ensconced back in the lab before ordering FRIDAY to keep an eye on the kid. FRIDAY dutifully informs him that Peter is sleeping soundly upstairs.

Tony pulls up the schematics for Peter’s mark one suit. The mark one was good - great even, considering he’d designed and fabricated the bulk of it before even meeting the kid for the first time. They’d both worked on upgrading it in a sort of piecemeal fashion over the intervening years, but clearly the whole thing needed an overhaul.

It’s way past time the kid had a full-scale upgrade, anyway.

He works most of the night, catching and discarding ideas as they come, running simulations to compare how the different materials will affect weight, flexibility, aerodynamics.

Most people would probably consider the invention of a new impact-resistant, highly flexible, breathable fabric material to be an accomplishment. For Tony it’s more like the inevitable result of sufficiently motivated and uninterrupted lab time.

Besides, if he stays focused on work then he’s not thinking about the kid upstairs asleep in his bed.

When he finally screws up the willpower to head back upstairs - FRIDAY is printing out a prototype suit, leaving him with nothing better to do in the meantime except hunt up more coffee and possibly a breakfast-like food item - he finds Peter perched at the kitchen counter, sucking down a glass of orange juice.

“Morning,” Peter says a little awkwardly, wiping the back of one hand across his mouth.

“Morning, kid. Hungry?”

“Yeah.”

Tony hits a few buttons on the Lattissima to get coffee brewing and then cracks open the fridge to take a look.

“We can do omelettes, pancakes, toast… I think there’s a waffle machine around here somewhere.” Tony ducks his head out of the fridge, opening a few of the cabinets to poke around.

“Toast is fine.”

“Why does no one ever think I can cook?”

“Can you?”

“I became an expert on thermonuclear astrophysics in like, six hours, you think I can’t handle eggs?”

Peter makes a vaguely ambivalent noise, watching as Tony slides a couple slices of whole wheat bread into the toaster.

“You sleep okay?” Tony asks. “You look a lot better.”

Peter nods.

He does. There’s a few splotches of yellow bruising on his arm, but overall he seems to be breathing and moving significantly easier than he was last night.

“If you stick around for a couple hours, I’ll have a new suit for you to test out. Lighter and tougher. The impact resistance could probably use some more work, but it’s a place to start.”

Peter sets down his glass. “You made me a new suit?”

“Well, yeah. Your old one is toast, it’s been patched to hell already anyway. You were due for an upgrade.”

“I thought you were gonna yell at me again.”

“Oh I can do that too, if you want, but I wasn’t really planning on it. You did good, kid.”

They both jump a little when the toast pops up, breaking the moment. Tony pulls up his design on a holoscreen over the kitchen counter, running Peter through it while they munch on breakfast.

Those same alarm bells from last night are back - somewhat less urgent but no less insistent than before. Because Peter is leaning over one elbow on the counter, relaxed and easy, reaching into the display to manipulate pieces of Tony’s design like it’s something he does every morning over breakfast. His hair is sleep-mussed, although there’s clearly been some effort made to finger-comb it into submission, and he’s still wearing Tony’s shirt and sleep pants.

When Tony runs a simulation of how the impact resistance works, Peter stops mid-chew and swallows, grinning wide.

“That’s awesome,” he says. “Wait, run it again, I want to see how the bonds shift in response - ”

Tony could get used to this.


End file.
